Ninety seven percent of Europeans who responded to a public consultation on the most controversial element of the European Union’s emerging trade deal with the United States were mobilised by campaign groups.

The European Commission’s much-delayed analysis of a public consultation shows that around 120,000 of the 149,399 submissions were identifiably from campaigns generated by eight non-governmental organisations critical of plans to introduce a new way of resolving disputes between governments and corporations. Of these, about 70,000 were “identical or very similar” in their answers to all 13 questions posed by the Commission. Another 50,000 were submitted via one NGO, although the responses varied moderately, with various individual answers to the last question.

Another 25,000 showed signs of being a response to a campaign, though their sources was impossible to identify.

The consultation on an issue that Cecilia Malmström, the European commissioner for trade, today described as “toxic” to many Europeans is part of a broader bid by the European Commission to counter claims that the emerging trade deal with the United States is undemocratic and lacks transparency. Last week, the Commission released the details of the mandate that its negotiators had been given by the EU’s member states.

Malmström said today that the consultation was “not a referendum” and that the EU’s institutions needed an “open and frank discussion” in a “lot of meetings” in the near future before deciding the future of talks on the issue of an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism.

The consultation, however, has already generated significant questions about the weight that the EU’s institutions and politicians should attach to the results of a consultation dominated by mass campaigning groups.

Malmström said that the consultation had revealed “deep scepticism, that is clear” and that the EU needed to decide how to address four concerns in particular. These included striking a balance between protection of investors and the rights of a state to regulate, when to refer disputes to international arbitration, how that arbitration system should work, and how appeals against arbitration rulings should be handled.

The Commission describes its analysis as an factual assessment that tries to present all the views expressed and that does not offer a policy recommendation.

Minutes after the Commission released its analysis, however, the Green group in the European Parliament criticised the Commission’s work. Its spokesman said that the Commission was “trying to fob off public concerns” and was showing “a total lack of respect for the public and civil society and their concerns”. He also condemned the Commission’s unprecedented transparency initiative as “superficial”.

Jos Dings, the director of the Transport & Environment non-governmental organisation and a member of the EU’s TTIP advisory group, also lambasted the Commission. “Despite the overwhelming call on the Commission to drop ISDS, it has obscured the true extent of opposition in order to ram through its agenda to reform the unreformable,” he said.

A very different view came, before the analysis, from a senior US official. Europeans should be careful about giving the same weight to “a thoughtful response or a one-liner saying ‘I hate TTIP’”, he said, going on to question the commitment of some anti-TTIP NGOs to transparency. “In the US, NGOs publish their finances, but in Europe, we don’t really know,” he said. “We need to understand better; everybody should understand who is behind the NGOs.”

The Commission’s analysis gave the names of some of the trade unions and business groups behind individual submissions. However, its paper did not give the names of the eight NGOs that mobilised the identical or near-identical responses.

European Voice understands that the major submissions came from the websites of 38 Degrees from the UK, Campact and the Umwelt Institut from Germany, Roosevelt 2012 from France, No transat and CNCD-11.11.11 from Belgium, and No 2 ISDS, a platform set up by – among others – the Austrian Labour Federation and the environmental group Friends of the Earth.

The geographical breakdown of responses showed 34.8% of submissions coming from the UK, 22.6% from Austria and 21.8% from Germany. These three countries – together with France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain – accounted for 97% of the submissions.

The data has been with the Commission since 13 July, when the consultation closed. An EU official defended the five and a half months that it had taken the Commission to appraise the responses, saying that many of the 3,589 expansive responses from individuals and 569 submissions from organisations were very detailed, in some cases running to hundreds of pages.

He insisted that the delay had not been affected by political considerations. “We had no interest in delaying work; on the contrary,” he said.

The issue of ISDS has, however, been highly political from the outset. The unusual step of launching a full-scale public consultation during trade talks – coupled with a suspension of trade talks – was called last January by Karel De Gucht, when the issue emerged as the most controversial in the TTIP. De Gucht was himself a firm advocate of the ISDS system and, since leaving office on 31 October, has continued to call for TTIP to include an investor-state dispute settlement mechanism.

By contrast, the new president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has let it been known that he shares many of the concerns voiced by members of the European Parliament. The position of the new Commission, which Juncker has explicitly said should be more political in its decision-making, has already led to a number of TTIP-related clashes.

Shortly before Malmström had her confirmation hearing before the European Parliament last autumn, Juncker’s chief aide, Martin Selmayr, was revealed to have altered a planned response by Malmström on TTIP. Later, EU member states intervened when it became clear that Juncker planned to make critical public comments about the ISDS issue. Juncker then watered down his comments.

The support of a qualified majority of EU member states – 15 member states, representing 65% of the EU’s population – would be needed for any change to the mandate given to the European Commission, which stipulates that an ISDS system should be “without prejudice to the right of the EU and the member states to adopt and enforce…measures necessary to pursue legitimate public policy objectives”.

Malmström, who has said that she hopes to have a skeleton agreement on TTIP by the end of the year, said that “by the spring we [the Commission] need to come with a proposal” on how to proceed with the investor-state issue.